After beating Infosys and Wipro in revenue growth, Cognizant has gone ahead in terms of employees too.
The New Jersey-based software exporter at the end of the first quarter of this financial year (it follows January-December accounting year) has added 6,000 employees. This takes Cognizant’s total employee base to 1,62,700, ahead of Infosys, which at end of 2013 fiscal had a total of 1,56,688 employees, according to official data. Wipro had 1,45,812 workers at the end of the fiscal year.
TCS top the table
At the end of June quarter in 2012, Cognizant went ahead of Infosys, posting a 20 per cent revenue growth, which was the first time since the company was founded in 1994 as a captive of Dun & Bradstreet.
While TCS leads the pack in terms of total employee, which according to data stands at around 2,76,196, Cognizant reflects a similar optimism- both with regard to employees and the deals it expects to bag in this fiscal. While, Indian software sectors have been huge job creators, employing 2.8 million people directly and another 9 million indirectly, the industry has come under increased stress due to a slowdown in business from developed markets and an anti-outsourcing sentiment emerging in these geographies.
Companies such as Infosys, HCL and others have deferred their hiring needs, citing lack of business visibility, going forward.
“Hiring position seems to be muted this year because many companies still have large number of people waiting to be deployed in IT projects,” Infosys co-founder and executive co-Chairman S. Gopalakrishnan had recently said.
Cognizant did not give a break up of number of people hired in different business areas- from coding to business analysts, but according to CFO Karen McLoughlin, the company added 19,000 employees in 2012 and around 50 per cent of them were experienced professionals.
Changing biz model
Apart from a large number of employees on the bench, some companies are trying to change their business model and ushering in more automation into their work (like writing software codes), thereby replacing humans.
While this is at a early stage, this decoupling of revenue growth to the number of people added, is somewhat similar to how the automotive industry started using robots in the assembly line, a trend recently indicated by Infosys, HCL and Wipro.